Statement

As a traveller, as breaking into the world, I wanted to leave the narrowness of my bourgeois background behind me. In the distance, the traveller meets other people who are leaving, searching, wandering. In my case, these were often people without a permanent residence, children, and adolescents with a focus on the street. They had managed what I had always dreamed of, to run away from their parents. Even though their freedom was close to the opposite, the predicament of survival, I admired the radicality of their decision. With the same empathy, I also accompanied especially female migrant workers in China who had broken out of the narrowness of the village's patriarchal regime, which reserved the chance of a future for its eldest sons. For them, migrant work also means the chance of emancipation and self-determination through their own income. These experiences shape my approach to documentary photography. I am also in first person on the road and have got to know so exciting people who pursue their dreams under sometimes most difficult conditions that it would be far from me to reduce them to a victim status. My pictures do not celebrate misery and nothing lies further away than the viewer's tears. Instead, they are open and multi-layered. The viewer's gaze can wander between different levels or jump back and forth irritated. Delicate colours, familiarity, and closeness meet a harsh reality that sometimes only emerges from the context, small details or the ambiguity of a gesture.